Cultural Competency

The APA Best Practice Highlights provide information on six specific minority and underserved populations. These guides include demographics, significant history, best practices, mental health disparities and stigma to help contextualize your assessment and treatment.

Racial/ethnic, gender, and sexual minorities often suffer from poor mental health outcomes due to multiple factors including inaccessibility of high quality mental health care services, cultural stigma surrounding mental health care, discrimination, and overall lack of awareness about mental health. These fact sheets provide a snapshot of the current state of mental health of minority populations and some factors that may contribute to mental health disparities among these groups.

APA’s traveling programs educate communities around the nation about mental health disparities and encourage and facilitate collaboration among community stakeholders to take action in order to eliminate mental health disparities. These programs set the stage for ongoing collaboration and advocacy to prevent and eliminate disparities and improve mental health in a given jurisdiction.

The Mental Health and Faith Community Partnership is a collaboration between psychiatrists and clergy aimed at fostering a dialogue between two fields, reducing stigma, and accounting for medical and spiritual dimensions as people seek care. More than 40 prominent, diverse faith, psychiatric and other mental health leaders gathered on July 11, 2014 to inaugurate the Mental Health and Faith Community Partnership.

This introductory guide offers an array of topics that will be essential in understanding how to work with TGNC patients. It provides basic information to raise awareness of the needs of TGNC patients and how to incorporate gender-affirming care in psychiatric practices. This toolkit does not represent official APA policy, but offers a perspective from physicians that work with this community on a regular basis. The objective of this toolkit is to help a broader range of psychiatrists become familiar with best practices for treating TGNC patients. This content is available for APA Members.

Climate change is a global challenge which is affecting the civilizations across the world. Not only it is expected to affect physical health, it is also likely to affect mental health. This activity will discuss the overview of the problem and its impact on mental health. It will also review the ways to address the mental health issues consequent to climate-related disasters, and the impact of climate-related disasters on vulnerable populations.

Indigenous individual communities experience significant health and mental health challenges, but are also capable of incredible resilience. Meanwhile, many indigenous people live in urban centers, rather than on reservations, making it important that psychiatrists are equipped to provide culturally competent care to this population. This module will review historical perspectives of Indigenous peoples, identify common diagnoses, and walk the learner through the cultural formulation, indigenous and non-indigenous interventions, and potential sources of strength resilience.